Comment on Six fuel ships bound for Australia cancelled
MisterFrog@aussie.zone 1 day agoAt this moment, but oil exploration and re-expanding our oil refining capacity doesn’t exactly happen overnight either.
I agree with you that our energy system is dependent on oil, and we’re continually kicking the can down the road on this one.
The best time to invest in a green energy future was decades ago, the second best is now.
We just have to stop waiting for the free market to do it, because it won’t do it, and if it does, it’ll be way too late.
Storage needs to be built like yesterday, even if it’s terribly unprofitable at first. Until we have that, no for-profit company will want to invest further in renewables (assuming we continue capitalism).
In any case, we need to build it (via the government), because the private market hasn’t, and won’t.
TheHolm@aussie.zone 20 hours ago
What you listed is exactly means “impossible”. To be more precise “Practically impossible”. And really, batteries are not a answer, we simply can’t make enough to cover the need. But more realistic way to rid off coal, nuclear never get promoted by so called “green”. Be back to earth, plan for something which possible to achieve in next 10 years, we just do not have time for something which take 30 years to materialise. And oil have to stay anyway, but more as material than source of energy.
MisterFrog@aussie.zone 13 hours ago
100% with you here. Hence why we need to preserve it and move to stop burning it ASAP.
Also agree with you on this. Batteries habe their place, but not for long duration storage, they aren’t practical for that. There a number of promising technologies (beyond pumped hydro which is probably the best, but requires certain terrain) while have poor round trip efficiency, are still worth it in my opinion - compressed/liquid air energy storage, vanadium flow batteries, other thermal solutions like sand.
It also bears noting that a lot of our thermal energy needs (both heating and cooling) could be built our as district heating/cooling.
There’s a bunch of stuff that can be done, we have literally no choice but to try.
Nuclear, while vaguely better than oil and gas, is a stupid long-term solution, because there still is almost no permanent storage of waste, and to get the most out of it, you need to do recycling which the US and other nuclear powers don’t want you to do because you can enrich plutonium.
I could maybe live with building it provided no alternative in the short-term, but just doesn’t seem like the smart play to me. Everyone just conveniently forgets about the waste which will last for 10,000s of years.
Thorium seems interesting though.
Almost everything listed above could be built right now. It wouldn’t be the absolute most efficient thing possible, not profitable, but we could start right now - and are, but usually drips and drabs and banks don’t want to fund them at the scales we need.